purple fashion magazine— F/W 2016 issue 26

Sylvère Lotringer

A student of Roland Barthes, a renowned professor at Columbia University for over 30 years, and a close friend of Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Patti Smith, Mike Kelley,and many others, SYLVÈRE LOTRINGER has been immersed in the academic world of philosophy and French Theory as well as in the underground culture of downtown New York and LA. As the founder of Semiotext(e), first a suberversive magazine and then an influential publishing house, he has brought together some of the major thinkers and artistic forces in contemporary art, creating an intellectual context for all those involved in the creative sphere.

DONATIEN GRAU — You came from a Jewish Polish family, and you were a hidden child during World War II. After the war, you became part of militant Zionist groups. It seems to me that this experience — the feeling of belonging to a persecuted minority and the production of a community — has had a big impact on your life. SYLVÈRE LOTRINGER — It did. I trained myself to surmount any situation. It wasn’t clear at the beginning that it would lead to what became my life, being involved in such things as I was. Of course, something biographical can “rhizomatize,” but it is only retrospectively that I can figure out what impact all those events had. I can now look at it from the outside. The strange thing was that coming to America, which I did eventually, was just the total reversal of what I had been taught in the movement. In the movement, the idea was to not become a leader, to not take things personally — everything was shared. The kibbutz was supposed to be a place where we share everything. You just give everything away when you arrive, and everyone is going to use it in community — your clothes, everything. It was a very radical kind of time for kibbutzim.

I have to go back to 1949, when my family was in Israel. We had such a hard time in France during the war that they said, “Why don’t we go to Israel?” So we emigrated to Israel in early 1948, ’49. The state hardly existed. I stayed there for about a year and a half. I went to school and learned Hebrew. And...

On the occasion of the survey “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest”, The New Museum presents a special conversation between Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist and curator Massimiliano Gioni, to discuss the trajectory of the artist’s practice over the past thirty years, and a focus on the artist’s latest exhibition.

“Pixel Forest” spans the artist’s entire career, from her early single-channel videos of the 1980s, which explore the representation of the female body in popular culture, to her recent expansive video installations, which transform architectural spaces into massive dreamlike environments enhanced by hypnotic musical scores. See our coverage of the exhibition here.

The conversation will takes place on January 17th, 2017 at the New Museum Theater. Get your ticket... Read More